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The Multi-billion pound ‘own goal’ of Business

I worked with a major UK insurance firm a few years ago. Every year eager executives would ask its CEO what his vision was for the following year. His answer was always the same: ‘To make one less huge mistake.’ He was experienced enough to know that the revenue would flow in. His concern was wasting it once it arrived. If he could tackle or prevent this year’s big – and avoidable – mistake, then the revenue would really count instead of gushing away into a deep hole of the company’s own making.

This chapter is about a big mistake that almost all companies are going to make this year. And the next. And the one after that. I call it Nearly Meeting.

How do you know if you are nearly meeting?

A nearly meeting is any meeting where the participants fail to get real value out of their coming together. They are the ones which offer a poor return on the time and effort invested – for the individuals taking part and the organisations they work for.

Nearly meetings are the ones where problems are half solved, the issues are partially understood, the right things are almost said. They come that close to being useful. If you ever stagger out of a meeting room wondering where the day went and what you did with it, you’ve probably been nearly meeting. You’ll have semi-resolved problems, almost discussed what truly needs to be discussed and practically decided what to do about it.

I am reminded of Billy Crystal’s magician character in William Goldman’s fairytale comedy The Princess Bride who claims the hero isn’t alive or dead, but ‘mostly dead’. And so it is with nearly meetings. We are ‘mostly’ meeting. And it’s completely frustrating.

People complain about the difficulties of virtual meetings – as though if only people were off the phone and in a room together the problem would be solved. All nearly meetings are virtual – whether you are face to face or not. We should probably not even call them meetings at all; missings would be more accurate.

‘Busy day, dear?’

‘Murder. I’ve been in back-to-back missings since 7.30.’

Nearly meeting is a strange no-man’s-land between being separate and really connecting. I suggest it’s where many of us spend the majority of our working days.

Counting the cost

Whoa. Did you just give me ‘the look’? It’s the imperceptible tightening of the brows and lips which says, ‘I am a hard-nosed business person and what does this soft issue have to do with my bottom line, sonny?’

I’ve seen it the length and breadth of the business world, from boardroom to shop floor. And when I see it I ask clients – as I ask you now – to consider the following:

Imagine you are in a role which requires you to attend three hours of meetings a day. And let’s say you’d score those meetings 70 per cent effective. Let’s also imagine there are 100 people like you in the company and that your average wage is, say, £60k. None of this is particularly far-fetched, you’d agree? OK, then.

You just wasted 82 days in meetings this year, costing your company a pretty significant £1m. What’s more, if you were to continue at this rate for a conventional career, you’d be burning a total of nine years, six months and three days of your working life.

This is hypothetical, but far from fantastical. Here’s a real example which I put in front of the board of a major pharmaceutical company who weren’t immediately convinced that ineffective meetings were having a significant effect on their business.

They’d called me in – as clients often do – to get more creativity into their working practices. People often feel this is a kind of spray-on process but quickly discover that the blocks to creativity lie in some very fundamental practicalities.

In the Pharma’s case the numbers were more like 4.5 hours spent in meetings per day, 60 per cent effectiveness, average fully loaded costs of 100,000 Euros and 2500 employees. Put them through the formula and there’s an eye-watering 56 million Euros of invaluable time and cost you just poured down the drain.

By any standards that’s a major mistake to be making. And to keep on making.

So yes, it’s a soft issue. But with a rock hard centre. It’s like flying through a cloud with a nasty, big mountain hidden inside it. The implications for your financial as well as physical wellbeing can be sudden and drastic.

When I am talking to people who like to differentiate their activities in terms of ‘hard stuff’ and ‘soft stuff’, I like to describe the work I do particularly with meetings as ‘the hard-soft stuff’. Soft, in that it’s broadly a people issue. And hard because it’s tough to fix.

When you start to really change meetings, you are tinkering with the culture of the business, and issues don’t come much trickier. It’s easy enough for your business to commit to culture change when you are on a blue-sky-thinking executive-retreat somewhere nice and warm. But visit the workplace a week or two later and you’ll find the ‘nearly meeting’ culture is as stuck as ever. We’ll look at how to change things more effectively a little later in the book.

Nearly Meetings are a worldwide epidemic. And epidemics are something that one of my clients Thomas Breuer knows more than most about. Thomas doesn’t have a golf trophy in his office. Nor one of those toe-curling posters shot against a Hawaiian sunset saying what a real leader is made of.

Thomas Breuer, a physician and epidemiologist by training, is Head of Global Vaccine Development (GVD) at GlaxoSmithKline Vaccines. In the GVD offices there are photographs of African women and their children. They are there to remind all of them of their deadline to license a malaria vaccine and the devastating prospect on mortality in Africa if they fall behind their target. And malaria is just one area of attention. When H1N1 swine flu last threatened the world, it was on Thomas’s watch. It explains why Thomas is intolerant of outdated processes and wasting time.

When Thomas took over his new role, his first act was to have multiple small informal lunches with groups across his entire staff of 1400 people.

What they told me again and again is that we are wasting huge time and money in meetings. The amount of money we were burning in people time in wasteful meetings was mind-blowing. I realised instead of hiring in or outsourcing there was one untapped jewel sitting in the middle of my department and that by doing meetings better I could create more time for people already in the company and who have the skills I need now.

So, how to engage a group of medics and scientists in meetings when they’d all rather be out saving the world from rotavirus, shingles, cancer and worse? The answer, it turned out, was to stop focusing on meeting efficiency and start thinking about meeting health. We set up a ‘meeting hospital’ and for three months we took in meetings that were sick, needy and near death and brought them back to life. Quite a few of the techniques in this book were developed in the casualty department of the meeting hospital.

The results read like one of those ‘before and after’ weight-loss posters on the tube. After three months 97 per cent of participants found meetings more purposeful, clear and engaging.

Clearly, with the right antidote and a big bucket of innovation we can tackle nearly meetings. But the question is, if they are so manifestly unhealthy, why do we keep having them?

We nearly meet because … in a mad world it makes sense

If I worked every day in some of the companies I visit, I am certain I would be nearly meeting in a week.

When I started working with one of my clients, part of their business had a monthly six-hour conference call involving 100 people around the world. That’s 72 hours a year or nearly two whole working weeks. Multiply that by the number of participants and you are looking at a collective year and a half of working life. It had better be a pretty important subject, wouldn’t you think? But it wasn’t. It was a business-as-usual thing. No one wants to be in that meeting. Certainly not for six hours. But no-one feels that they can legitimately not take part. So they sit there, rolling their eyes in various locations around the world, one eye on the blackberry, the other on the clock, pretending to meet. In an illogical system, it’s the logical response.

We dealt with this meeting in a way that I strongly recommend you try in your own company. We blew it up. And then we only put back what was absolutely needed. It turned out that the real hot topics could be best showcased in a bimonthly webforum. And the informal information sharing is now done, café style, at the end of the day every six weeks or so.

We nearly meet because … we have lost control of our diaries

I have come to realise that diaries are like houses. It is easy to fill them both with unwanted clutter.

In 2008 the Pearls decided to spend a couple of years living in Italy. When we rented out our house in London we put half the furniture in storage and took the rest with us to Piedmont. On our return we had only 50 per cent of our original furniture and the house felt – absolutely fine! Or to put it another way, we had been living with twice as much stuff as we needed but hadn’t noticed because we had got so used to all the clutter around us, we’d stopped seeing it. So, now take a look at your diary and all the meetings in it. Which half needs to go into storage? There will be two kinds of meetings cluttering up your day: Standing meetings and Ad Hoc ones.

Standing meetings are the regular ones which are fixed (daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly) at the beginning of the year and/or project. They are like the furniture, fixtures and fittings. You don’t necessarily know who gave them to you or why they are there, but they have been around so long you have ceased to notice them; they have become the background to your life. The rest are Ad Hoc meetings. They appear unexpectedly in response to a situation, problem or request. I think of these as impulse buys that you see at the weekend and ‘must have’, or mail – including junk mail – that arrives on your doormat clamouring for your attention.

The rules for de-cluttering a house or diary are very similar. You need a brutal cull of the unwanted contents you have accumulated and a severely selective, No Junk, entry policy to prevent any new rubbish crossing the threshold.

We nearly meet because … it’s an attractive alternative to real work

Steve, a prominent LA tax and business advisor, takes client service seriously. And so he should. His starry clients are the sort of people who expect him to be on call 24/7.

In case you were thinking your senior people are capriciously demanding, you should spend a day or two in the performing arts where Stars can be really Starry. One tale I know to be true from my time in the opera world is that of a sumptuously gifted but notoriously high-maintenance operatic soprano who was feeling a little warm in the back of her limo while driving through Manhattan. Too grand to lean forward and ask the driver to turn up the air-conditioning, she picked up the limo phone, called her agent in Los Angeles, who then called the driver in New York with the message.

Steve talks of his earlier career in a large corporate practice where he was expected to attend a daily meeting at 11.00 known (I kid you not) as the Donut Meeting because there was nothing much else to talk about. ‘I was an outlier,’ he admits.

I was one of the few people who thought that if you are in a service company that the real priority was to, well, serve clients. I felt that instead of sitting around shooting the breeze there might be things that the client would actually want you to do, things you were, er, paid to do. So I used to excuse myself from the Donut meetings and go to talk to some clients. Actually pick up the phone and speak to them. It seemed to me that most of the others were actually scared of doing that. You’d ask them if they had called client A and they’d answer yes. ‘When?’ Three weeks ago. ‘And since then?’ Well, they’d been busy in meetings.

Clients don’t want to hear you are in meetings. They want to hear you on the other end of the phone. It’s not great telling billionaire clients bad news, but I find it’s always better than hiding away. Instead of holding a Donut meeting, I would go and talk to a few people and get the job done.

Steve has nicely summed up one of the key messages of this book. Instead of holding wasteful meetings, get out there and start having the real meetings and conversations that really matter.

Or, as the T-shirt would say: Less Meetings – More Meeting.

We nearly meet because … technology^* makes it so easy

It’s 10.58 on the bustling concourse of a London train station. Suddenly a granny throws down her walking stick and starts jiving. All over the station people join her. They dance in concentration and in silence, perfectly synchronised by the music they hear on their iPod headphones. Exactly two minutes 11 seconds later the dance stops as magically as it started and the participants melt away.

The Flash Mob that has just happened is a great illustration of how technology helps us nearly meet. None of this would have been possible without the internet. The participants convened online, practised their dance at home in their web cams, texted each other where and when to meet. Everything has been prepared and performed at arms’ length. That’s its beauty and irony. It’s less entertainment and more a shared personal experience for those in the know. A silent dance, an un-performance by non-performers. A crowd of people dancing alone is so very 21st-century. And a perfect illustration of how technology loves us to nearly meet.

I really admire people who have embraced the nearly meeting medium with creative flair. People like Eric Whiteacre who have created amazing online choirs, or StreetWars, who galvanise whole towns into staging water pistol ambushes through social media.

That said, I am doubtful about whether all this supposed digital connectivity has actually brought us closer as human beings.

I met a London cabbie the other day. He was a chatty guy but was looking subdued. ‘Just had a lady in my cab and asked her, “How are you today?” She gave me a filthy look and shouted, “I am married, you know,” as though fending off an attack.’ Apparently this is happening to him once a week. A most basic human exchange is taken as a threat of violence.

America, the most netted-up nation on earth, is increasingly the land of the loner. In his book Bowling Alone, Harvard professor Robert Putnam shows how Americans at least have become increasingly disconnected. Family dinners have apparently dropped by 43 per cent in 25 years; people are 35 per cent less likely to have friends over to their houses; and the bowling alleys of the USA are increasingly used by individuals competing against themselves.

Thanks to Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn we are accruing vast numbers of ‘friends’ we’ll never meet. In many cases live meeting is actively discouraged. Even my eight-year-old son knows not to show his face on screen and to use a coded name when talking to his mates in Seattle or Brazil about the latest Lego craze.

It’s all very flattering to have a huge network, but drain the digital bath of drive-by acquaintances and people trying to sell you something, and how many real relationships do you find?

The other day someone I haven’t seen for 20 years – and barely knew back then – waved to me at a concert and wished me Happy Birthday. How the hell did she know? Apparently my Wall told her. Walls don’t just have ears any more. They have mouths. I didn’t feel flattered. I felt stalked.

Clearly there is a dissonance between the media we have available to connect with others and our success in using them.

Nowhere does technology facilitate nearly meeting better than our busy, busy businesses. Co-workers email each other rather than look around the computer screen and talk. Meeting tables come ready plumbed for laptops, so face time and screen time inevitably compete.

I am looking forward to the time when someone recommends the face-to-face meeting as a wild new innovation. I suspect it’s not far away. Especially when people are making such a fuss about new technologies which are – drum roll – in 3D. Our lives are in 3D, if only you’d rip your eyes away from your 2D screen long enough to notice that!

I’m struck by how we are using all sorts of very tactile, kinetic verbs – ping, prod, tweet, twang – to describe interactions that are totally disembodied. How funny that we talk about using technology to stay in touch when there’s no touching at all. OK, I give my Apple the occasional loving stroke, but …

If I am sounding Luddite, I don’t mean to. Technology enables businesses to cut down on the time and cost involved in physically bringing their people together. And let’s not forget, this is also in the interests of the planet, minimising the carbon carnage of those unnecessary international flights.

But virtual meetings are – as their name plainly advertises – not real. They encourage us to almost, just about, nearly meet. It’s a real challenge to make and keep real human connection with disembodied voices or truncated torsos across continents and time zones. We’ll look later in the book at how to make the best of the medium and ‘create intimacy at a distance’.

Bottom line: just because technology can connect us, it doesn’t mean we do really connect.

A colleague told me a poignant story about a friend of his, a top-flight corporate lawyer who spends her time jetting around the world, constantly in touch with clients on one of her two BlackBerries by text, BMS, email and MMS. Recently, on a fevered dash from one meeting to another, she flipped her car and was nearly killed. Staggering out of the wreckage and just glad to be alive, she reached for her phone to tell her loved ones that she was alright and realised she had no-one to call.

The ability to really connect is natural, but requires practice or it withers, with predictably negative effects on both our business and personal lives.

We nearly meet because … that’s what we want to do

Let’s face it, other people are hard work. They have this annoying habit of not agreeing with us. They have their own ideas and agendas. They don’t, for some reason, think we are always marvellous. They are complex, demanding and just plain tiring.

Why would we want to meet them? Better by far to pretend to meet. Nod but don’t hear. Smile but don’t mean it. Keep ‘them’ on the outside and save your energy.

When I am not in London – or on a plane – I spend as much time as I can in rural Italy. As a lifelong city dweller I am acutely aware of how few people you see on a normal day in the north Italian countryside. The scarcity of the people seems to put them into high relief. You notice them. They notice you. Your eyes meet. You raise your hand. You briefly discuss the ripeness of the tomatoes, the likelihood of rain, the latest aches and pains and whether Juventus are likely to scrape through this season without pouring shame on the club/the region/the nation. It is the sort of setting which encourages connections with others. London is another story. As I take the plane, taxi or tube back into the centre of the metropolis, I feel my mind becoming overwhelmed by potential connection. There are just too many people. I start to screen them out, like the iris of your eye shutting down to protect you from a blast of bright sunlight. Within minutes I am in a bubble where I can walk through a crowd of people on Oxford Street and see – no-one.

This ability of the mind to filter out information is a key to our development as a species – and our survival as modern humans. The ability selectively to screen out background sounds so we hear what is being said to us is key to our communication. It is similarly crucial to our survival that we can separate the features of a landscape we don’t need to know about (the green stuff) from the things we might need to know about (like a sabre-toothed tiger).

There is growing concern at the connection between the use of digital music players and fatal accidents. The London authorities have started talking about ‘iPod zombies’ and San Francisco has spent millions on a media blitz warning against the screening-out effect of earphones. ‘Do you want Beethoven to be the last thing you hear?’ one lugubrious ad asks the city’s joggers.

We nearly meet because … we confuse efficient and effective

As the doyen of management consultants Peter Drucker once said, ‘Efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right things.’ Many companies are focusing on making their meetings more efficient. That doesn’t mean they are any more effective.

I have a friend who is a world-class management consultant. I’ll call him Ron – not his real name – for the sake of discretion and to prevent his clients taking out a contract on me. He has a great example of a client that has become exquisitely efficient and wildly ineffective at the same time. It’s all to do with paper. The client generates hundreds of thousands of sheets of contracts and agreements at each of their branches every week. The company has had to become supremely talented at moving all this paper around as well as storing and retrieving it. They have invested in ergonomically designed paper-carrying equipment (I think this means strong suitcases), transport systems and document logging. They were thrilled with themselves until Ron asked the unasked question: ‘Why do you need all this paper?’ They were ready for this. ‘Because the regulator requires that we get our customers’ signature.’ Ron pressed on: ‘Yes, but why does that signature have to be on paper?’ he asked, no doubt making a lifelong enemy of the Logistics Director. In this digital age there are many legally acceptable forms of signature, of which a mark on paper is only one. There’s a tick on a form, a digitally scanned signature, a thumbprint, even the iris in your eye. Ron’s point was that while the paper is being dealt with efficiently, the more effective course of action would be to invest a tiny fraction of the time, energy and money into talking with the regulator and finding a paperless solution. Efficient, yes. Effective, no!

I have seen efficient meetings – meticulously planned, immaculately laid out and run perfectly to time – that had no positive effect whatever. (We’ll look a little later in the book at how to redesign meetings so that they are both.) These are classic ‘nearly meetings’. And they are going to be happening all over the world today and every day. The people are present, or appear to be; the room or the call/video conference suite is booked, the agenda prepared, and yet no connection in a true sense actually happens.

We nearly meet because … we forget there’s an alternative

Finally, the most pervasive reason of all, we nearly meet so much because we don’t realise, remember or believe we can really meet.

I am reminded of a leadership programme we were involved in delivering to the top echelons of a major European financial services company. It was held in a spectacular castle on the outskirts of Paris. At the end of our three days together the participants were talking about what they had got out of the experience. One man was asked what he had learned. I knew that this self-confessed ‘numbers guy’ was earmarked for great things, but he looked terribly awkward as he said his piece.

‘Every Monday I have a meeting with the people who report to me and I usually just like to get on with it. I don’t see any need to talk to them about themselves, how they are or what they’re up to. I am a doer and I see this kind of thing as a waste of time. What I didn’t realise until now, though, was that there was a real person sitting opposite me.’

He then sat down, looking somewhat apologetic and puzzled by an insight that was at once so mundane and yet so far-reaching – not just for his career but beyond.

I think this client spoke for all of us who crash through the day, intent on getting things done, and forgetting to connect with the people around us. We forget they are people, not just ‘functions’.

It’s because of stories like this that I’ve become curious about meetings. We go into meetings disconnected not only from others but also from our own thoughts, feelings, bodies and our true nature.

Realising that nearly meeting is mostly what you are doing is a great first step to start really meeting.

The True Cost of Nearly Meeting

Nearly meeting is exacting a huge cost not just on us and our businesses but on our planet.

Great meetings can save the world. Bad ones can really harm it. I can think of no better opportunity of a world-sized missed opportunity than the 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen. I wasn’t there, but I’ve heard from friends who were that it was a fiasco. A nearly meeting on an epic scale. With epic consequences.

The problems started even before you got into the conference venue. Thanks to inadequate – or wilfully negligent – planning, entry queues stretched for hundreds of yards and required ticket holders to stand in the open air, sometimes for several hours, in polar conditions, without the comfort of heating, refreshments or even a coffee. Coffee sellers wanted to set up concessions but were not allowed to. It was as though the Danes, normally quite welcoming folk, wanted to discourage people from attending.

There wasn’t even a fast-track entrance for VIPs. Ashok Khosla, Chairman of the New Delhi-based social enterprise, Development Alternatives, who is also the current President of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) found himself grid-locked in a non-moving mass of humanity and was clearly about to miss his speaking slot. If you know sustainable development, you know of Ashok. He’s been described by the United Nations Environment Programme as ‘a legend in the realm of sustainable development, and an individual who personifies the hopes and dreams of billions trapped in the indignity of acute deprivation.’ This didn’t impress the slab-faced security guards. He only managed to queue-hop by distracting one of them by making a comment on her guard-dog’s condition.

Once inside (and many people gave up before they ever managed to enter), the problems were worse. The unlovely venue, wonderfully misnamed as the Bella Centre, seemed custom-designed to make you lose your way – a maze of small committee rooms and misleading signs.

There is a well-known YouTube film of the then British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, sweeping confidently into what he thinks is a meeting room only to find himself in a cupboard. President Obama likewise had to go on a peek-a-boo treasure hunt through the corridors to find that his meeting with the Chinese delegation was already underway without him.

The Chinese premier was in the building (like Elvis) but famously refused to meet his US counterpart face to face. Brinksmanship? Diplomatic theatre? Or an unwillingness to have a real meeting?

Guardian journalist Mark Lynas was in no doubt: ‘The Chinese premier, Wen Jinbao, did not deign to attend the meetings personally, instead sending a second-tier official in the country’s foreign ministry to sit opposite Obama himself. The diplomatic snub was obvious and brutal, as was the practical implication: several times during the session, the world’s most powerful heads of state were forced to wait around as the Chinese delegate went off to make telephone calls to his “superiors”.’

This was pure power politics – nearly meeting at its most blatant. Clearly at a meeting like this, each nation will have its own agenda to pursue. In some cases, minimising perceived threats to their economic growth; in others, like the Maldives, literally keeping their heads above rising seawater.

This need not have been a problem, had the participants really wanted to use this meeting to make the world a cleaner and safer place. But they did not. China and others clearly had no intention of playing anything but their own game. And as we are going to see a little later, intention is all.

The power plays of Copenhagen set the precedent for COP 17 in Durban in 2011, where we were treated to the unedifying sight of Saudi Arabia’s oil sheikhs holding the meeting – and the world – to ransom by insisting that they be compensated for losses they would suffer if the world stopped burning fossil fuels. As the Economist reported:

Most of the scores of diplomats present were appalled. Not least those from small island nations, like Kiribati and Tuvalu, which are likely to disappear beneath the rising seas long before the Saudis have drained their last well. But it mattered naught … After a fraught few hours of bickering, the Saudis got their wretched commitment.

That’s nearly meeting. In place of collaboration there is bargaining. An opportunity for joint action descends into a clash of competing ideologies. I was in a meeting recently where Trevor Manuel, formerly Nelson Mandela’s finance minister and currently the head of South Africa’s Planning Commission, summed up the limits of this approach. ‘Ideology means you know the answer before you hear the question.’ Instead of real conversation you get ping-pong rallies of pre-prepared attitudes and opinion.

The COP events are a particularly high-stakes own goal. But I would suggest that every nearly meeting we hold goes some way to destroying value in our world.

Nearly meetings are not just unproductive, they are counterproductive because they undermine our trust in the power of really meeting.

And really meeting can change the world …

* As US computer pioneer Alan Kay pointed out, ‘technology’ is a name we give to any technical advance invented after we were born. For my parents’ generation, the colour television came under the heading of technology. Not for mine. Television was as normal as plumbing. For us it’s laptops and wifi. Who knows what our kids will think of and see as technology? Looking back, though, there must have been a time when a table with four legs was the most advanced, jaw-dropping meeting technology on the planet. I’d like to have been there to see that.